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  Oh my goodness this is good!  So cleverly constructed and convincingly written that it is almost impossible to put down because you just need to know what on earth is going to happen next. We all like our privacy, but imagine if someone had found a way to get into your house while you are out, and then find a way to hide themselves to the point where they can actually live in your space and get access to everything you own.  In the book, Juno is that person, and she is a homeless woman who is slowly dying and she can't face another winter living outside in the park.  Juno gets into a family home by chance, but when she chooses to stay, she finds herself getting more inquisitive every day.  Every family has secrets, but what if they are hiding something that could blow their lives apart if it comes to light?  Juno finds that secret, or at least she thinks she does, and from then on she digs and delves into every secret place in the house.  It isn't lo...

This was a wonderful read and I discovered it with perfect timing for Halloween week.  It tells of an unexplained death within the close island community of Saoirse Island that sits in the estuary waters of Puget Sound on the west coast of the United States; and it comes with just the right amount of mystery and magic to keep me hooked to the very last page. Saoirse Island life is bound up in tradition and folklore with the older women still teaching their granddaughters how to set spells.  Fourteen years before the story begins, four teenage friends, August, Emery, Dutch and Lilly, graduated high-school, and August and his girlfriend Emery were planning to leave the island the following morning to get August away from his violent and controlling grandfather. The night before they were due to leave, the great orchard belonging to the August's family caught fire and after the fire was out, Lilly's body is found among the trees.   Her death may have been murder but mys...

  The author took the idea for this book from the true story of the mission to liberate prisoners from a train headed to Auschwitz.  The central characters are a fictitious family, but they were created to represent the real prisoners who were a mix of men, women and children from all walks of life. The mistreatment of Jews has been well documented in both fiction and non-fiction books, but Pam Jenoff's book highlights the extreme bravery of ordinary people who were trying to do all they could to help people who would almost certainly die if no-one did anything.  The book tells of resistance fighters who help allied airman to escape and they are supported by a whole network of people who pass on covert messages or simply leave visual signals to indicate danger.  Every action could mean imprisonment or death for those involved so everyone involved is risking their own life to help others. The book gathers tension as it goes on, and by the closing chapters there i...

  This week I had to turn to the one book on my shelves that I hadn't read because I haven't been well enough to get to the library to stock up.  I've had some sort of virus that may or may not have been Covid, but I'm pretty much over it now and I can get back to library books next week. This one came from the bowls club second hand bookshelf and it cost me all of 25p.  The publication date inside is 2016, which is pretty recent for anything on the club shelves as most of the other books have had several anniversaries since arriving and should really go in the recycling bin. The Gustav Sonata has a certain oddness or otherness about it that I can't quite define, but I know I am not like the people in the book.  I don't know if Rose Tremain always writes in such a clinical style, or whether she adopted that way of writing to suit the characters, but it's precise and unfussy in a way that seems right for Swiss people. At the start of the book Gustav is a litt...

  A Terrible Kindness is a debut novel that deals with some of the most sensitive subjects and somehow manages to make it all work.  It begins at the time of the Aberfan disaster that took place in 1966, and a newly-qualified embalmer is called upon to help deal with the bodies of the children and bring them to a state where they can be identified by their desperate parents. I was eight when the disaster happened, and I remember the shock of seeing the dreadful pictures on the news after a huge colliery spoil tip collapsed, and swept down the hillside engulfing the primary school and killing 116 local children and 28 adults.  Even today, almost 60 years later, this remains a story that must be handled with the utmost care and I think Jo Browning Wroe achieves that. The author grew up in a crematorium, so I suppose she absorbed the dignified etiquette of dealing with the dead and the bereaved, and bodies in her book are offered the kind of care you would expect f...

  At the time of writing, this book is top of the paperback fiction chart in the Times newspaper and after reading it I can see why it is so popular. As ever, I selected the book without putting much thought into it but by the time I had scanned the first few pages, I knew it was going to be a winner.  The writing is bright and modern and just a few pages in, a child is stabbed on the street and that is certainly enough to focus the mind.  From then on, it's difficult to put the book down. The idea for the book is taken from the crazy treasure hunt that was launched in the early 1980s with the publication of a beautiful picture book titled, Masquerade.   The author of Masquerade had crafted a beautiful golden hare and buried it somewhere in the countryside, and anyone who could solve the clues hidden in the text and pictures could dig up the hare and keep it.  I was newly married at the time and my husband and I bought a copy as soon as it was published, an...

  Oh dear, this was not for me.  I never do well with fantasy fiction and with the exception of Set My Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson , I have not found one I liked. I knew I was in trouble by the time I read the second sentence and found the main character was called 'Wendowleen'.  That's the same name given to the potential girlfriend in one of the Wallace and Gromit animated films, and after that I was stuck with the image of a plasticine woman with bobbed hair that looks like a loaf of bread and rather big teeth. The story is set in a fantasy world that I didn't really get to grips with, but the people are ruled by a political group known as The Finery that oversees all aspects of their lives.  Professor Wedowleen Cripcot is over a hundred years old and lives with her assistance wolf in a large house with more bedrooms than she is entitled to.  The Finery has decided that she must either take in a lodger or move somewhere smaller, even though it has ...